New Meadows, Idaho, Ranger Station
Daily Temperature Records
This is where I started back in 2015 and it deserves new look. I've had complaints that not only is USHCN data "not official" or "deprecated," and that the only good data is GHCN-D (Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily), so I thought I take a look at it. Simultaneously, I was also tinkering with R programming (#ClimateHysterian Twitter trolls sometimes like to claim that using Microsoft Excel is not "scientific"), so I did some simple analyses. Little seems to have changed since my previous analysis, except that by breaking it down into maximum, minimum, and average (defined as [Tmax + Tmin] / 2) temperatures, I could take a closer look*.
Daily maximum temperatures appear to be declining over the 100+ years of record, and the past three years (2017 and 2018) seem to have been cooler than usual. While this is minimal change over 100+ years, despite station movements that I have documented and other potential biases, maximum temperature cannot be said to be rising based on these data.
We often hear from those skeptical of climate change as a pressing issue that average temperatures may be misleading because average temperatures can increase without a need for hotter maximum temperatures if minimum temperatures are increasing. At the New Meadows station, minimum temperatures may be increasing slowly, but the rate is nearly undetectable.
Apparently, however, this does seem to result in possibly increasing average temperatures as well, though it seems unlikely that catastrophe is imminent as there have been many higher average temperatures in the past.
USHCN Monthly Adjustment Effects
Another comment I often hear is that the time of observation (TOB) adjustment is the most significant piece of the adjustment (or "correction") process. USHCN data used to have TOB and homogenization adjustment posted, but GHCN monthly only contains homogenization that includes something for TOB. The maximum, minimum, and mean trends for raw and "corrected" data are shown below for the New Meadows station; TOB does not seem to have been the dominant adjustment for this station and homogenization appears to have changed potential trends from apparently declining or flat to increasing.
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* Daily temperatures are not adjusted like monthly data are, so these data are presumably "raw" and do not contain homogenizing "corrections" for non-specific errors like GHCN monthly data do.
